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by alxndr 4979 days ago
"Some people's emails got out into the public internet, and were indexed. Some of these emails were from Facebook, and included links..."

Doesn't Google's toolbar phone home with the URLs you click on? That could be a way to get supposedly-private URLs into Google's list of URLs to be visited.
2 comments
stanleydrew 4979 days ago
Matt Cutts has publicly stated here and in other forums that the Google Toolbar does collect click data but does not use the data to insert URLs into Google's index. Here's a recent(ish) post on the matter:

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-toolbar-indexing-12894.ht...

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randartie 4979 days ago
That's an interesting idea, but as someone noted, most of the emails involved here come from a small set of domains, such as blogger or anonymous mailinator type emails (emails which are possibly crawled by google often!)

I think if it were google's toolbars picking up urls in emails, that there would be many more email domains here.

link